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1918 – July 19

Interviews and interviews with all the Staff Branches. My object is to persuade them to let me take on the Urmieh situation and save 80,000 Christians from being massacred.* Very hot but pleasant to see real civilisation and drink soda and other good things. Romantic sleeping on a marble floor on banks of Tigris with moon reflected on water – electric punkah.

* This is a reference to what is now known as the Armenian Genocide or Armenian Holocaust; the Ottoman government set about a systematic extermination of ethnic Armenians starting in 1915. Assyrians were also massacred in the Urmia region; historians consider the various genocides against non-Ottomans in this region as part of the whole Armenian Genocide. These peoples were already being targeted as a result of their Christianity – the prevailing religion being Muslim – but it is hard to ascertain from the brief reading I have done whether their religion or their being non-Ottoman was the key motivation behind their slaughter.